Let's force the racists off the streets!

Did you see the news article about a load of racist graffiti being sprayed all over a block of flats?

Well, these flats are known to me and I thought I would not let a bunch of racists twats get away with this; so yesterday I printed off a load of leaflets and on the way home delivered them through the letterbox of every flat in the block.

These leaflets did not mess about either; it told people to get out and vote on Thursday in the local council elections for ANYONE but the fascist, racist, nazi BNP; register your protest and make sure your voice is heard.

All racism in every form needs to be confronted. Make the racists and fascists the ones that are worried; do not allow them a platform and challenge racism wherever it raises its ugly head.

To do more, go join up with the Unite Against Fascism and the Hope not Hate people - and most importantly vote on Thursday against the BNP.

Heart of Empire CD-Rom; read the first chapter online for free

As long time readers of this blog might know, I run the official Bryan Talbot fanpage over at www.bryan-talbot.com. In many ways it is one of the proudest things I have done online.. When I was learning how the first web design packages (anyone else out there remember Adobe PageMill?!) I realised that I would need a real world, live project of my own to learn the software sufficiently that I could teach it. There is really no way that you ever learn something until you do it for real.

And so I thought long and hard about what I could do a website on, and I decided that one of the very few topics I cared enough about would be the work of Bryan Talbot. (also relevant was the fact that there were no other sites about his stuff yet in existence; if I was going to enter the field I wanted to be number 1 in it!)

And so - 12 years ago now - I started the website. And then when Bryan had finished Heart of Empire he came up to me with his now famous "I am getting really tired of people asking where I get my ideas from; is there a way we can tell them? - and maybe make a couple of quid into the bargain?" - and so the Heart of Empire CD-Rom was born.

Now; I have always found it hard to summarise what the CD-Rom is about in a short space of tme - the so called "elevator pitch". If I have got 10 minutes or so I can easily get peoples heads around it, but if I have a couple of minutes it's hard - mainly because there is just so much on there!

And so I thought why not release the first chapter online for free and allow people to read it and see what it is like without trying to explain it! - and so here it is! - allow me to present to you the entire first chapter of the Heart of Empire CD-Rom!

Online marketing masterclass from the Gadget Show

Did anyone else catch the Gadget Show last night? It provided an absolute masterclass in online marketing. The presenters were given a challenge of "achieve online fame in three weeks flat".

The first presenter - Suzi - went to an established online marketing agency here in Birmingham - Tamba Internet that thought they knew what they were doing.... They created a "viral game" that would publicise her. (and what's more, the link to the game from their site opens in a new window for crying out loud!) Now the first they got wrong was allowing the presenter to make the "pay off" an "accidental" video clip of her getting changed with "accidental" movements of the other presenters hands covering up her naughty bits. Erm - sorry.. - this is interesting to me how?! In an era of celebrities hardcore sextapes leaking onto the net, how the hell is this gonna engage? This is pitched at the level of maximum crapness and patheticness; for anyone not used to these sex tapes it is just enough to shock; for anyone well used to the sex tapes it is utterly incapable of titilating in anyway... - and the agency should have told the presenter this! They failed in their duty to their client of stopping them from making a horrendous decision that would actually damage them!

Then the agency compounded this error by an order of magnitude, by making a game of such undescribable boring-ness that I wanted to poke myself in the eye with a pen to make it go away. It consists of the presenter reading out the name of shiny-shines - "Ipod!" - "DVD player!" - and then the player has to click on them on some shelves behind her. (and after playing it, it is actually quicker to get to the "naughty" video by losing! - if you just let the timer run down then the game ends - and you get the same pay-off for losing that you do for winning - but a hell of a lot quicker!) These idiots utterly fail to understand playability and usability; they do not understand gameplay or how to make something interesting and compelling and I failt to see how they stay in business.

They fall for the classic, basic beginners error; just because you can do something on the net doesn't mean that you should... - of that if you go ahead and do it anyway just because you have the technology does not mean to say that a fetid dingoes kidney in the real world is any less of a fetid dingoes kidney just because it is an online Flash game that is an emailable viral marketing campaign.

Content, content, CONTENT!!

Postscript; this is how much these jokers fail to get the point; in their news article to plug their inclusion in the show they do not even link to the online game!

OK; that's it; time to join the Green Party

I have finally faced my deep cynicism with mainstream, existing political parties and joined the Green Party.

The existing political parties are too in debt to established big business interests and will not - and can not - take the moral leadership needed on these critical issues. Pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are doing great work... - but they are on the outside trying to exert pressure... - the only thing that will make a different is real world political power - and that's local city councillors, MP's and MEPS.

So - if you are also disgusted at the slow rate of change and also despairing about the worlds we will leave to our children then do something! - join the Green Party now!

In Birmingham they are trying an excellent tactic; focus all available campaigning resources onto a single council seat and go all out to win it. In other cities where they have tried this it has worked well, and I cannot believe that Birmingham does not have a single Green City Councillor! The only way to save the planet is to get serious political power; and the only people currently with any credibility whatsoever are the Green Party.

Birmingham Freecycle now has 11,000 plus people in it!

Birmingham Freecycle now has over eleven thousand people in it! That's just incredible!!

I heard about Freecycle back in October '04 and thought it was such a great idea; when I came to check if there was a Birmingham UK one I couldn't beleive that no one had already launched a group! - so I immediately did so and it's just gone from there.

It started slowly, but for the past year has been gaining a huge amount of momentum. I still moderate the group every Friday - so watch out if you try and join on that day, or if you come and try and scam us... my patience for idiots gets less every year....

What I am trying to do now is to get the City Council to help us out; publicise us on their website and newspaper that is sent to every house in the City. The reason is that we are saving them cold hard cash from purely green motives and without making money ourselves; because they get taxed for every ton they put into landfill and there is nothing better for stopping stuff going into landfill than Freecycle.

Anyone out there know how to get the Council to actually do something?!

I wrote to my MP and she has started to badger their head of recycling - but so far - nothing!

Birmingham is starting the fight against climate change

I attended the Birmingham Strategic Partnership consultation event last night at Think Tank on the Birmingham Climate Change Action Plan.

Whilst I was there I hooked up with Birmingham Friends of the Earth and volunteered and also shamelessly plugged Birmingham Freecycle to anyone who would stand still for long enough - and a few of those that wouldn't....

The event itself was OK; the council thought seem to be still working under the assumption that they can reduce emissions by less than 90% and still carry on much the same.... this is a bit shocking for anyone else who has read any of the excellent George Monbiot's work. Go there and read it now and prepare to be seriously scared; he shows how we need to URGENTLY cut emmissions by 90% or we will face a tipping point at which climate change enters a cycle of positive feedback and becomes self-reinforcing and runaway.

But what I have to rail against is crimes against usability again. The external moderator was from a company called BMG; she seemed to be seeing the presentation for the first time as she had no idea where each section finished and the next started and EVERY SINGLE TIME she overshot and had to fiddle with the PC on the podium to sort it out. Also it was glaringly obvious that she had never done the presentation in front of a real audience; it was "interactive" to the point where we could vote using a traffic lights metaphor - and each question was put on screen with the text and JUST the text in the appropriate colour on a strong blue background.

No thought was given to colour blind people; this probably violated the Disability Discrimination Act, and even people like me without colour blindness and with my glasses on found it almost impossible to read. No one had thought "you know - if we used huge blobs of colour on this we could make it easy to read". It had clearly been slapped together by one of this power-suited busy executives minions without any thought to the final audience or any oversight by the person doing the presentation.

And it's not as if it was a trivial message - you know the kind of stuff these market researchers usually do - "do you prefer cat food tin label A or B?" - no, this was about how we in Birmingham cope with and reduce the effects of climate change, probably the most important issue for the entire next century, and far too important to be left to losers like those last night. If anyone from the City Council ever reads this - you really should sack these people and emply someone who knows what they are doing; this issue is too important to be mishandled so badly.

DAMN but it's fun cycling in Birmingham the snow!!

So as usual, when it snows in England everyone predicts doom and apocalypse.. but you just know that they would also be the first to complain about the cost if we paid enough to get blanket coverage from snow ploughs and gritters. As it is we get such little snow that there's no way we can afford enough of them... but hey, try telling that to the People Of Restricted Cognition....

Anyway; I now cycle to work as it is probably the only exercise I can get nowadays and also because if you don't live your beliefs then you're just a pathetic wimp in my opinion. And I have to say that cycling in when it was snowing was just IMMENSE fun! - the old saying is so right: "there's no such thing as bad weather: there's only the wrong clothes."

Also, I am lucky enough that my route runs along a disused railway line, and this morning it was Christmas card perfect!

The argument for vegetarian's might have just become irrefutable; it's killing our planet

I have always been ambivalent about vegetarianism; on one hand if it is a moral, ethical decision by someone who just cannot face the thought of eating another living beings body I have been supportive.

On the other hand, I have always been profoundly suspicious of it's supposed inherent health benefits: I mean - we are omnivores! - our bodies and teeth and lifestyle predicasted us to eat everything; roots, berries, cereal, nuts, eggs, meat, fish, fruit, veg - the lot.

And yet - and yet... I have been increasingly worried about the impact that eating meat has on the environment - and that we do not eat meat in the fashion that we evolved to. If you look at our evolutionary lifespan we have spent something like 99.98% of our time as modern humans eating meat only when we could track down the damn animal and club the beggar to death - so about once or twice a week. That's what we have evolved to do and our bodies are not good at handling meat 10 or 12 times a week; we get heart disease and obesity; we are simply not designed to handle that much rich protein.

Then you look at the environmental costs of eating meat:
- it takes 10 times as much energy to grow meat as it does to grow vegetables; in other words, 10 people could live off the protein that it takes to grow one cow or pig to feed one person. On a small and increasingly over-crowded planet that is just getting unsustainable.
- the carbon costs of eating meat are rising all the time; we have to spend carbon to grow the food to feed the cow or pig, to transport the animal to slaughter, to refrigerate its dead body until we can eat it and then to dispose of it's bones afterwards.
- the waste products are increasingly overwhelming; cows and pigs produce methane and nitrous oxide which are 23 and 296 times worse for the environment than carbon dioxide is; and then there is the 5 million tons of manure produced every day by American farms.

In short it is just time to quit eating meat; or at the very least to revert to the pattern of meat consumption we were designed for; once or twice a week at most. It's not just better for you - it's what we need to do to save the planet.

See the excellent article on Alternet for more.

Great reasons on "why not to wear a suit"

Check out this blog on why not to wear a suit; one point I really love is where he says that certain people probably need a suit to get confidence and stature in their company - and he states: "Well let me be the first to tell you that if you feel like you need a suit to gain that confidence, you got problems." Genius!!

Then there is the flip side; if you stopped requiring everyone in your business to wear a suit then it is the equivalent of giving them a tax free pay raise. Let's all do this!! - it is now the Official Policy of the Peoples Democratic Republic of Birmingham to ban all suits in business! Wear what the hell you want! - and judge people on their competence, not what they wear....

If you find the blatant racism on Celebrity Big Brother revolting then the solution is simple; STOP WATCHING IT!

If like me you have found the blatant racism on Celebrity Big Brother to be nauseating and revolting to watch then the solution is simple; stop watching it!

I gave up on this show some years ago when I came to the conclusion that to watch it was to consume it - and also therefore to endorse it. Even worse; watching it meant that they got ratings which meant that they made more money from their advertisers and that the show would continue.

Just stop watching it! They deliberately create controversy in order to boost ratings - and unlike other artificially created controversies real people get hurt in this one!

Then after the show, demonstrate your disapproval for racist twats like Jade Goody and Danielle Lloyd by refusing to consume anything they produce and wreaking their fucking careers; these people depend on us the viewing public for their livelihood! Show them that we stand against racism in ALL forms by not watching them and not listening to them. Make them do real work out of the public eye; they do not deserve our attention if they do not subscribe to the basic decencies that the rest of us insist on.

The single good thing to come out of this has been (as far as I can tell without wathcing it) - the quiet dignity of Shilpa Shetty - and the fact that she might now be a household name in Britain! - Yay! Go Bollywood!!

You could not make this up; creationists in the US refuse to allow their kids to see "An Inconvenient Truth"...

This is just unbeleiveable; some religious, creationist bigot in the US is refusing to allow his kids to watch "An Inconvenient Trust" at school because - get this - he insists that an opposing view be presented as well.

THE CLUE IS IN THE FREAKING TITLE OF THE MOVIE!!! - It is called "An Inconvenient TRUTH" - these are facts! - they are evidence that has been taken from measuring reality; they are not open to debate or argument! Scientists have gone out, looked at a thermometer and written down these numbers! - photos taken ten years apart of the same glacier retreating 500 meters are not made up!

I can see why oil company executives insist on trying to deny climate change; their careers, companies and self esteem are bound up in doing so... but what possible reason does a religious idiot have for doing so?

Can anyone give me one, sound reason why we allow cars on the road with a top speed that is a multiple of the maximum legal speed?

This is yet another example of the failings of capitalism; immature men with insecurity complexes will always demand fast cars to make up for their many physical and scial failings... and if they are demanded then they will be built.

But where is it in the interests of society to allow cars on the road that can do double or triple the legal speed limit? Just what is the point?

Maybe there is an argument for increasing the speed limit on motorways to 80 mph; maybe we should allow cars to go slightly faster than that to allow for overtaking... but why the hell should anyone be allowed to drice a car that goes faster than 85 miles per hour?

And YES this is state intervention!! - because I simply do not trust the competence of these drivers! There is no need for such powerful cars to be allowed!

And of course, the side issue of greater fuel efficiency is just an added bonus!

How to stop dogs savaging kids

I cannot believe it; yet another young kid is savaged by the family pet. Even more unbelievable is the fact that the family takes no responsibility for their actions, and allowed a drug dealing thug of a relative to keep a vicious dog in the house. When someone is keeping a dog for it's intimidation value then don't let kids anywhere near it.

And everyone bleats about how legislation is needed, without taking responsibility themselves. This will always fail so long as dangerous dogs are identified by breed. This is total crap; the only dangerous dogs are those that have had their tails docked by petty minded twats who are more interested in how a dog looks than in keeping kids alive.

Let me explain; a dog's tail pretty much serves one function alone; to tell other dogs (and incidentally humans) the dogs mood. I have never heard of a dog with a tail savaging a person! You can tell when those dogs are angry and back off. If it was made illegal to dock a dogs tail for the petty vanity of the owners and breeders then we would all be left with the single best signpost to the dogs mood ....

... and the number of deaths by dog attack would drop like a stone.

A new term for excellence: "arm-shavingly good"

I just saw the trailer for the new movie "300" based on Frank Millers graphic novel....
... and then watched it again, and again...

... and then watched all of the features on the production of the movie....

... and then wateched it again...

... and every single time I watched it I got goose-pimples... - you know the kind that you get when you feel profound awe in the prescence of greatness? - yup: those.

The story itself is just amazing; 300 Spartans defended the pass at Thermopylae and held off an army of an estimated quarter of a million Persians for three days whilst the rest of Greece mobilised.

But this movie rendition just instilled awe in me time and again; I really cannot wait to see this movie! - it's like waiting for Lord of the Rings to come out all over again! Hence the title of this blog entry: the trailer was so good that it raised goose pimples on my arm every single time I saw it - and so in response I need to shave the hairs off my arm to stop them raising every time; so this trailer alone is arm shavingly good!!

Crimes against usability 2; just utter, rank incompetence!

So; I am working away at the dayjob, editing the list of exhibitions we will be at over the coming months. Part of this naturally requires me to link to the exhibitors websites; usually a quick way of doing this is to go to the venue, look at their event listings and then click on the link to the relevant exhibitions website to get the address to place onto our site.

And then ExCel in London (apparently they thought it'd be a really cool idea to name their venue after a spreadsheet... this should tell you all you need to know about them..) decided to open the links to the advertising sites in a new window (oh; JOY UNBOUNDED: a new freaking window to deal with?!) - and after a warning sign telling you that you are leaving their site (no fecking shite Sherlock; that's what usually happens when I click on a freaking link!!!!) and then to just make absolutely, positively sure you eternally hate their company for life - they do it in a window with no controls, no address bar, no menus and no buttons.

How can anyone be so incompetent? Do they have no idea at all that this pisses off people to the point of blogging about it? - and avoiding their site as if it was ten day old medical waste that had been left in the hot sun?!?!

Check it out at their utterly incompetent site - click on the link to the Pro2Pack site and enjoy the rancidness.

Am I the only person that thinks that threats to prostitutes would be vastly reduced if both drugs and prostitution were legalised?

The vile murders in Ipswich have got me thinking. Surely these women don't want to have to walk the streets and sell their bodies.. aren't they forced into it by being addicted to an illegal substance - and it's the very illegality of it that forces them to such extreme measures.

What if the only place they could get a fix was at a doctors... where they got clean needles and works and support and encouragement to give up... what if the drugs were free and all you had to do to get them was to register as an addict... what if prostitutes were tolerated and not persecuted. (and before any loudmouth bigots jump all over this, notice what I am saying and not saying here: we TOLERATE prostitutes; we make their lives easier whilst at the same time removing the reason that over 90% of them became street walkers; the drugs ARE NOT FREELY AVAILABLE AT THE FECKING SCHOOL GATES - in fact whilst making addicts less of a target for prosecution we continue to target the dealers; in fact, drugs become a taxed government monopoly. Overall we make drugs harder to get into and easier to get out of)

So - suddenly we remove the reason for the vast majority of women to solicit on the streets; and those women that still do want to work as prostitutes (as if anyone ever really wants to do that; maybe that should be "those women compelled to work as prostitutes because they have no other way to earn money") can do so in safety in a brothel or massage parlour.

So tell me; if we made these changes, how could that sick fuck have murdered 5 women? - and how would these changes affect you reading this? Unless you are a drug addict or a prostitute I fail to see how you can stand against a change that would make their lives better,

Every little helps; reduce your PC power consumption with LocalCooling.com

In the battle for energy efficiency every little thing you can do will help; today I cam across a tiny little application that gives you a massive amount of control over your PC and how much power it uses; best of all it estimates how much CO2 you've saved and allows you to aggregate your statistics with everyone else who uses the program.
Go check it out at www.localcooling.com

Say NO to ID cards

I am in the habit of collecting arguments that refute superficial and facile support for large and contentious issues. (the fact that the kind of people who support such issues are typically fat, self interested bigots is entirely besides the point...)

One of my current favourites is when I say that I am against ID cards and the reply comes back - with a certain sick innevitability - "wll, if you ain't got anything to hide, what are you scared about"...

So I reply: "Really? - how much did YOU earn last year?" - and "what websites did you surf to all of last year?"

And then comes the killer; if anyone is stupid enough to actually trust the government and come up with a "we've nothing to fear - they would not use this info against us" REALLY?! ARE YOU MAD?! You could have just as easily stated the exact same thing in Germany in 1930 - or in Rwanda in 1990, or in Bosnia, or in Armenia, or Stalinist Russia ... The State is Not Necessarily Your Friend; if it gets taken over - and they DO get taken over - this ID database will be the most potent tool against the people.

Do you trust every government that will ever come into power? - if you do you are stupid.

Campaign against ID Cards; at the very least sign this petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/IDcards/

Just unbelievable! What do you need to do to get a company to apologise?! Vision Express are officially INCOMPETENT!

So; I went out on Satruday to the rather splendid Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham - home to the now iconic Selfridges building.

Whilst the First Born Son was asleep and the Significant Other was stuck in a queue I thought I would stick my nose into Vision Express and get them to tweak my glasses which had developed a small but annoying twist in the frame.

This proved to be my mistake. Going into a shop as vehemently incompetent as Vision Express that is.

I sat down and the assistant gleefully took my glasses to be adjusted in the "laboratory" (without I might add indicating in any way at all that there was any risk associated with untrained apes jumping up and down on my glasses in a laughable attempt at "adjustment")

So; I am sitting there in a hideous daze of uncorrected short-sightedness, counting my one and only blessing - that First Born Son is blissfully asleep and unware of the horror about to unfold. So; the assistant returns with the glasses in two parts. Seems that the apes had tried to just twist them violently. Now, even I as an untrained, non-expert diletante knows when to stop twisting the glasses so that they do not break!

And at this point you'd have thought wouldn't you that there would be some hint of an apology, some indication of remorse, but no! - in a branch staffed entirely by people below the age of 30 no one dared to admit that they had done anything wrong! No indication that taking my property and damaging it beyond use was in any way at all a bad thing!

The assistant tells me that they will of course replace the glasses; fair play on that point and credit where credit is due. (this apart from the fact that I would have caused utter unadulterated mayhem to that branch if they had not done so....) and then goes on to tell me - with a straight face - that due to the queues I would have to wait an hour and a half until I could see an optician to get my eyes checked so they could work out my prescription and make up a new pair of glasses.

This nearly caused me to go postal on the spot - I mean, they are the ones that broke my property and would stop me driving home that day... so how the hell was I supposed to get my Son home to feed him when he awoke? I proceeded to apprise them of these facts; in detail and at length, and they managed to get me in to see an optician straight away.

Then they told me to sit and wait for an hour and the glasses would be made up in their lab. So I did.

At the end of the hour I was desperate to use the gentlemen's facilities and asked if I could use theirs: the nearest public one was halfway up a flight of stairs and therefore inaccessible to me with the baby in the pushchair. They refused, saying they were not for customer use. Fair enough I reply; give me my glasses and I will leave and find some others somewhere. The minion duly leaves to find out where they were.

Nothing.

An hour and ten minutes later I ask again where they are. Again nothing.

An hour and twenty minutes later - and just about ready to piss in their pot plants - I ask again.
Some underage idiot starts to soft-soap me "please be patient; I will go and check now" etc, etc (but again - no apology) - and he fails to move and do ANYTHING - just stands there mouthing meaningless platitudes. I have to cut across him and say "SHUT UP AND JUST GO AND GET MY PROPERTY THAT YOUR COMPANY HAS BROKEN! RIGHT NOW!!"

So he did; FINALLY. I left there with such a bad taste in my mouth it is unbelievable. Not one person got it into their head that I might be annoyed that they had destroyed my property and did NOT APPRECIATE being forced to sit in their shop for 100 minutes of my Saturday. They could not see that even being asked to wait in the queue was not my idea as it was not my fault I was there! And not one of them could conceive of the fact that to just apologise to me - EVEN ONCE - would calm my temper down massively. Not one person owned the problem; no manager came out to say sorry; and HOW THE HELL DOES A SO CALLED PROFESSIONAL OPTICIANS BREAK THE GLASSES WHEN TRYING TO FIX THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

Avoid these idiots at all costs.

Good marketing in person as well as online

I managed to convince my dayjob to send me to an emarketing masterclass run by e-consultancy in London, and the day was almost entirely as I expected it; excellent insights into making your online marketing more effective from a very good emarketing consultancy.

One highlight for me was to meet Bryan Eisenberg whose blog and website I have read for many years and whose book I already own. I emailed the organisers in advance and asked them if he would have copies of his new book - "Waiting for your cat to bark; persuading customers when they ignore marketing" - Waiting for your cat to bark; persuading customers when they ignore marketing".

Then on the day itself I am sitting up front making sure that my company get's their monies worth and I recognise Bryan from his book photo. When the break arrives, I sidle up to him, mumble the usual inanities that you do when you meet an author whose work you like and asked if I could buy the book. He just said "I don't really have enough to sell - but I bought a copy over for you; here it is." He wouldn't take my money saying that because I was the only person to have emailed in advance and talked to him about his book thaen I deserved a review copy.

So - it's obvious that this blokes effectiveness at online marketing also extends into the real world and he knows exactly how to connect with people. I sure as hell ain't gonna forget his thoughtfulness and I am gonna do my best to get the most senior marketing decision maker in my organisation to read his book. (and if at all humanly possible to engage his organisation; how's that for a return on investment!?)

Now all I have to do after that is to convince them to give me the resources to implement the ideas expounded in his book - but that's another day, another battle!

Ever been given a present that is so good it made you cry?

It was my birthday the other week (and no - I am not going to tell you how old I was - suffice to say I am "old enough to know better but young enough to do it again")

I had created the usual list of stuff I would like to get, and on there was an old, old friend: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

This looked just stunning: EVERY single Calvin and Hobbes strip ever printed, on high quality paper, with extra goodies from Mr Bill Watterson himself.

Anyway; the day arrived and I am handed a HUGE present by the Other Half. And then (and this is the priceless part) as I start to unwrap it I refer to it to First Born Son as "loot"! - and for anyone who has never read Calvin and Hobbes (shame on you by the way!) - this is what Calvin himself in the comics also refers to presents as!

Then I get the paper off it and see what it is, and I am not ashamed to say that I was moved to tears. A huge part of it was the profound thoughtfulness of the Other Half at getting me such a great present - and the other part of it is the UTTER unmitigated bellowing-out-loud-delight of owning this thing.

Calvin and Hobbes has through the years given me more unadulterated pleasure than almost anything else. Ever. Amongst so called cartoons it is peerless; it is an eternal delight to read - there are layers upon layers of apt meaning - and it is funny as hell too. The warmth and humanity shines from the pages; the authors deep understanding of the foibles and imperfections of the human condition show through every panel....

... and all of this is acheived in a comic strip!

I cannot begin to tell you how good this comic is; I can only urge you to buy it at your earliest convenience.

And if Mr Bill Watterson ever happens to read this, all I can say is thank you for Calvin and Hobbes... were financial recompense required at an equal rate for enjoyment engendered then I would be in debt to you for the rest of my life...

... and I would not begrudge a penny.